Upheaval by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond begins this book explaining crisis therapy and how people do (or do not) resolve personal crises. He does the same with nations, noting the similarities and differences between both. What follows is less of a coherent thesis and more a series of anecdotes about past events in several countries relevant to the author’s life. Japan, Finland, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, Chile.

What struck me most about these countries was not Diamond’s bulleted list of crisis traits, but instead each country’s willingness to choose survival over pride and tradition. After bitterly resisting Soviet annexation, Finland lost five percent of its total male population and even went so far as to ally with Nazi Germany. Yet, they put this massacre aside and ceded to Stalin’s demands and fostered a relationship with the Soviets because it was the only way to survive. Meiji era Japan replaced a portion of their own culture and traditions with that of the West to better avoid colonization. Amazingly, Chile allowed Pinochet to live comfortably with influence long after he lost dictatorial power; the first woman president of Chile had her own father tortured by the man but still had to tread carefully and compromise given millions of people she was representing had voted for him. Even in non-rigged elections! 

The above is relevant in the next section of the book, which is a deeper dive into both Japan and the US’ current crises. Japan’s population is plummeting due to obstacles preventing families from wanting to have children as well as near total opposition to immigration. The US is experiencing an extreme level of political polarization that makes compromise impossible. Plus, right-wing led initiatives to erode true democracy, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. Both countries problems are deeply rooted in ideology and what feels to me a sort of pride or righteousness. Difficult to see both countries, especially the US, making an about-face like some of the nations mentioned earlier. I guess part of Diamond’s point is that both countries have done this in the past and could do so again. Still, I don’t feel optimistic. 

The book closes with global crises. Climate change, resource depletion, nuclear war etc. Not much new here — a collection of things the world must do to survive  as well as a handful of smaller scale examples of cooperation. Altogether it was a good enough book. Jared Diamond is a fine writer. This one just really lacks cohesion compared to his previous works.

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

SHIELD WAAALLLL!

The TV version of The Last Kingdom is hammy as all heck. It alternates from all too earnest dialogue between breathless period-dressed persons to fourth-wall breaking winks at the camera. Judging from the actor’s bodies, the Vikings entered the show immediately following a raid on a crossfit gym. The show has a loose grip on time passing and a character who was a baby in one episode is a teenager in another without the rest of the cast aging. It’s often melodramatic when it intends to be merely dramatic. 

Yet, it’s fun. It’s well-paced in an era of TV that finds delight in dragging a plot point over seven episodes, revealing it bit by tiny bit in each, when it could have been resolved in two. The Last Kingdom never ends an episode with the cast anywhere remotely near where they started. While the history feels goofy at times, at others it is genuinely enthralling. The 9th century is not often represented on screen and sometimes the show really takes you there, makes the character’s lives feel believable, and teaches you a thing or two. So, I enjoy watching it. Not enough to run out and buy the novels, but recently when I was vacationing on Cape Cod, I went to the bookstore and I guess Cornwell lives on the cape because all eleven (!) Saxon Tales were present. Thus I accepted that The Last Kingdom was now my beach read and here we are. 

The novel closely follows its first-person narrator Uhtred, son of Uhtred. He begins the novel as an English child, but it’s the mid-9th century and the Danes are invading. Following the defeat of his lordly father by the invaders, Uhtred is orphaned and adopted by a pagan lord. His inner conflict over whether or not he is English or Danish runs deeply through both show and novel. His English birthright combined with his Danish martial training catapults him into national events and eventually into the company of several historical figures, chief among them King Alfred the Great. 

The prose is crisp and like the show, fast moving. Uhtred is narrating the story as an old man and the novel buys deeply into this framing. He speaks directly to the reader. He admits his memories aren’t perfect, forgets some things and embellishes others. It’s interesting the way Cornwell dispenses with the notion that stories should be shown, not told. There is an immense amount of telling in this novel. Uhtred marries his first wife and tells us he can barely remember her face, suggesting she is not going to live all that long. Their first meeting shows her repulsed by him, but their relationship grows… completely offscreen. Uhtred summarizes it with a handful of sentences such as “We grew close” or “We suited each other”. This is intentionally done because Cornwell isn’t afraid to zoom in close on a battle scene or landscape and rattle off an evocative metaphor. I liked it. I think. I just wouldn’t want too much of it at a time. 

The world is brutal and Cornwell via Uhtred wants you to know it. People die young and often and childbearing is extraordinarily dangerous. Girls are married at thirteen. Law and church are fickle but all-powerful. Unlike Game of Thrones, there is rarely graphic detail. There’s stabbing and marshes red with blood but the specificity ends there. Sex is always in the past tense and in scarce detail. The front cover boasts a quote from George R. R. Martin praising Cornwell’s battle scenes. Eh, they’re alright. He’s good at visualizing the events, but when Uhtred’s stabbing dudes left and right and going into his ‘battle haze’ or w/e it is, I’m generally rolling my eyes. A younger me would have appreciated this more. 

Like the show, the history is fascinating. It does an excellent job of demonstrating that “English” is really a combination of many peoples. Saxons and Britons and Danes and Scottish tribes and more. Cornwell knows how to inject history lessons into the text without being obtrusive. I learned a plethora of details on how people in the 9th century lived. I learned that ‘viking’ is more of a verb than a noun and only used when Northmen were raiding, not when they were trading or traveling or simply living (then they’d be Danes or Pagans). Cornwell has a historical note at the end that explains that yes, much of this did happen and yes, the Danes did nearly conquer all English lands save for Wessex, the Last Kingdom itself.

All together, I enjoyed myself, but frankly not enough to leap right into part two. I’ll continue watching the show and maybe on my next vacation or long plane flight, I’ll return to the literary version of Uhtred’s England. 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

When I first heard that Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, announced he was sick of arguing there should be a black hobbit and was writing his own Africa-inspired fantasy series, I was thrilled. Not simply due to the change of setting, all-too typically western Europe-inspired in the genre, but because I often bemoan the lack of ambitious, well-written prose in fantasy. It’s often basic and obvious and uninspiring. I already knew James was a great writer so this wouldn’t be an issue.

Years later, it finally arrived. And… well… at first, I was mighty disappointed. The initial hundred pages of this book are not good. We’re introduced to our first person protagonist, Tracker, a man with a magical nose, who is in prison being interrogated about events of the recent past. The novel is Tracker relating to his inquisitors what actually happened over the past few years: a quest to find a lost boy that spins wildly out of control.

I will start by comparing this book to Game of Thrones, despite Roxane Gay’s top Goodreads review saying not to, due to both books’ extremely brutal nature. How can you not compare Black Leopard  to the series that popularized an entire sub genre of physically and sexually violent works? GoT brought us worlds that were highly reactionary to the heroic fantasy of the past. It’s hard to think that something that is as endlessly, horrifically, eye-rollingly violent (while still trying to be cool) as Black Leopard would exist without Martin’s success.

Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m still going to make a GoT comparison. The reason Martin’s books work for me and many dark fantasies afterward didn’t (including the GoT TV show!) is because while violent and grim, the novels are not without hope. They begin as a family drama; we are introduced to characters we care about, whom we want to protect from the miserable worlds they inhabit. The sex and violence is not the focus. Black Leopard begins by describing a similarly miserable world (in spirit if not substance) except I’m given no reason to care. Great violence is visited on Tracker, but he visits violence on others on the slightest whim. Also, it’s clear from the start that he hates women (more on that later). As a reader, there’s little to emotionally latch on to. We literally have characters announcing to each other “Nobody loves no one”. Might as well be an accurate statement in this world. I almost put the book down.

But I kept at it! And began to care. I can’t even give you a good reason why. More characters were introduced, all terrible people, but compelling. The plot itself picked up. Why was Tracker hunting this mysterious boy? Who was he? I also came to appreciate the writing itself, more and more. It’s heavily repetitious but eventually I found myself repeating Tracker’s signature ‘Fuck the gods!’ along with him. I also enjoyed the dialect, especially the way the various monsters or Sogolon the Witch speaks. Eventually, we’re introduced to Tracker’s soon-to-be lover, Mossi, and he becomes the beating heart of the novel, able to see the good in our hero, even when we, the reader inside his head, can not.

I want to put a good word in for the monsters lurking in the forests and jungles of James’ imagination. Demons that run on the ceiling. Hideously deformed men with bat wings or too-long arms or bird feet, reeking of dead flesh. Baby-stealing witches supping on fresh organs. I like a good monster and there’s plenty here. They’re scary and well realized and possess the right amount of a camp. I feel like a good barometer of whether or not you’ll like this book is: do you find a giant spider-man that shoots impenetrable web-cum from his spider-dick to be offensive and stupid or hilarious and creepy (and yes, a little stupid)? When, towards the end, one of the monstrous villains declares:

They think my brother like the flesh and I like the blood, but I eat anything.

The same fearful grin I wore as a way-too-young child watching the horror movie House suddenly blossomed.

The non-monster violence never meshed with me. Our main characters are able to best dozens of armed men single handedly. Limbs pop off like champagne corks. There’s a lame magic cliche that allows Tracker to pull off such a feat. It’s a fantasy trope I dislike. I suppose you can see it more as a metaphorical device for his rage to “kill the whole world”. Regardless, Tracker’s near invincibility lowers the stakes in otherwise tense situations. There are also MULTIPLE situations where Tracker is captured and strung up by some beast or creep or another and then suddenly wakes up free of them with no explanation. What the hell is that about?

I mentioned earlier Tracker has a problem with women. He does, partially by narrative design. Mossi calls him on this and he attempts some reconciliations but it’s unconvincing. The text itself doesn’t help. Women are kept at arm’s length throughout the novel and the most important ones are diabolical schemers, ready to dispose of Tracker (or anyone else) for their own personal, matriarchal power. While I liked the conclusion of the plot, it leaves further uncomfortable questions about women and power.

In summary: Monsters = good, prose = good, plot = pretty good, likeable characters = hella low, violence = uneven and often bad, misogyny = bad, too-long prologue = bad, me = ready for the next one.

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

I did not identify with Harry Haller, the ‘Steppenwolf’, as many readers do, especially those who read this book much younger than I. Instead, I was inclined to roll my eyes at his struggles, wherein he decries how hard it is to be intelligent and love Mozart in a world where people are generally not intelligent and love jazz (Hesse makes sure to toss in some overt racism while describing jazz). Of especial annoyance was when Harry goes on at length about how much he detests the bourgeois but repeatedly takes advantage of the comfort bourgeois life provides for him. My thoughts around then were: What a fucking baby. These thoughts morphed to incredulity when he surmises that the only reason the bourgeois class survives, given that they are so damn stupid, is people like HIM, wolves among the sheep. My god.

This is the first third of Steppenwolf — how tortured a soul is Harry Haller, so much better than everyone else, and life among the bourgeois class is just so hard, might as well kill yourself as aesthetics demand. I wanted to mail him David Foster Wallace’s essay on mindfulness. But, eventually, I did warm to Harry a bit. Gained a little empathy. The truth is that he was a German who lived through World War 1, while protesting it as wrong the whole way through. Now, it’s the late 20s and he sees WW2 coming and his countrypeople very rapidly falling in line with the nationalistic garbage that will launch it. There is a chilling line where Hesse writes of ‘the holocaust to come’, years before it occurs. This makes the Steppenwolf’s mindset and belief that he is unique among fools more understandable at least.

The middle third is where he looks to beautiful women to save him from himself. Yawn.

The final third is kind of awesome. Harry attends a costume party and descends into hell, which is the basement, and ends up tumbling through the doorways of his own mind, which includes an apocalyptic future of man vs. machine where he and a previously unmentioned childhood bud shoot up evil cars. And a doorway marked “love”, where he re-meets every woman he failed to seduce in his life and bangs them. My god.

There’s a slew of philosophy sprinkled throughout the novel. Some of it is interesting to read and I did like this paragraph, spoken by Harry’s gothic pixie dreamgirl, Hermine:

“No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity.”

I don’t believe that literally, but metaphorically it makes for a pleasing and comforting image. Mostly though, the musings here were familiar. The duality of Steppenwolf and the further realization that Harry is made of many more than two personalities? Eh. That a single person is made up of many personalities is not revelatory, it is both obvious and banal.

Hesse is a talented enough writer that I didn’t hate reading this. There are some legitimately good bits. But I was glad when I was done.

The Best American Essays 2018, edited by Hilton Als

I’ve been reading these collections for several years now and I’m not sure how likely I am to continue. At least a few essays used to really grab me. Last few years? Eh. Not so much. The weird thing is this collection doesn’t even seem bad and the intro essay, Hilton Als piece of the day-to-day exhaustion of racism and the difficulty of slinging ‘fuck you’s back at the world, is fantastic.

Is it me? Is it the collection? Is it the sordid state of world!?? I’m not sure.

Anyway, here’s my favorites:

The Art at the End of the World by Heidi Julavits — I liked this essay when I read it and I like it even more as I reflect on it. Our narrator drags her husband and two kids out to the Great Salt Lake, where sometime in the 70s, a peculiar land artist created a sort of jetty that spirals into the water. He did so intentionally during a drought so it can be seen only rarely. The family’s trip is heavily inspired by Julavits’ childhood on the coast of Maine, during the height of the Cold War and imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. Being at the edge of the world in Maine, she could easily imagine apocalyptic wastelands. Now, under threat of the effects of climate change, she wants her children, who live a city life far from the end of the world, to become equipped to imagine the end of all (most) things. The Great Salt Lake and a sometimes-seen artwork is the avenue for this. How to prepare for likely mass destruction? Learn to cope with the wasteland. Good stuff.   

The Other Steve Harvey by Steve Harvey — No, he’s not that Steve Harvey, man of the wondrous ‘stache, though on the phone he is confused as such. This Harvey’s essay about the face we put to the world and all the assumptions that come with it, and more importantly, the assumptions we make based purely on the faces we see on others is excellent. Musings on Trayvon Martin and Barrack Obama follow. How to make it so the first thing a person notices about another person is not that they are black is the question here, of which Harvey doesn’t have much of an answer as he repeatedly fails at trying to achieve it.

My Father’s Cellar by John Seabrook — In a spectacular effort to imitate the upper crust of England, Seabrook’s father has a highly prized, lovingly crafted wine cellar in the basement of their house. The locked door is hidden behind a bookcase, and when later the cellar is expanded, the second set of rooms is behind a fake brick wall. It’s almost immediately obvious here that Seabrook the child will become Seabrook the alcoholic, but this isn’t an essay whose strength is revelation. Instead, it’s a remarkably well drawn slice of life. I feel like I walked through that cellar, feel like I met Seabrook Sr.

Into the Breach

This game is cool.

I started off and thought ho-hum, this is fine, but it’s just a grid-based tactics game. A simple one at that.

Then I found myself, playing, playing, playing; the possibilities and strategies of such a simple setup blossomed and captivated.

In the future, ocean levels have risen and humans live on small, corporate-owned islands. To make matters worse, giant alien monsters called vek have appeared and are stomping over any buildings or people in their way. Luckily, a trio of time traveling humans piloting mechs appears to save the day (or not).

You, the player, are managing these mechs. You can choose a pre-set squad of three or mix and match. It starts simple with a mech that can punch aliens, a mech that can shoot aliens, and a mech that can push aliens in the cardinal directions. Other unlockable mechs will freeze enemies, spin them around, teleport them, light them on fire, and so on. This is a very repetitive game so the main source of diversity is how different mech loadouts alter the strategies you employ.

Combat plays out on a grid. You must protect civilian buildings — if they take too many hits, the game is over. You have to start over, almost entirely from scratch, save a single surviving pilot you can choose to blast to the “next timeline” (your next run of the game). In addition to shooting vek, you have sub-tasks like protecting a power plant or destroying a dam. These either allow you to take more hits before game-over or award currency you can spend at the end of an island to upgrade your mechs.

The big innovation here is that every single detail of the vek’s attacks are telegraphed. You see where they are going to attack, exactly how much damage that attack would do, in which order each enemy will attack, where new enemies will spawn, and so on. The UI is very good at communicating this. So if you see a vek is taking aim at an important building, and you can’t quite kill it (numbers are tweaked so that killing all enemies every turn can’t be done), then you could use a pushing attack to move it over a square so it harmlessly shoots a mountain instead. Or teleport it into the ocean. Or move another vek that is attacking first behind it so that it is killed by its buddy before it can attack. Thus each turn is basically a puzzle where you maximize your moves to prevent the vek from doing serious damage.

It’s ultimately very simple. You complete 2-4 islands and play the same final mission every time. Yet the loop is engaging. Even when mastering the game to the point where my runs were successful nearly every time, new mech types or achievement challenges would change it up just enough to be worth another shot. On the cusp of unlocking the final squad of mechs, I can’t see myself playing all that much longer, but for $15, the experience was absolutely worth it.

Elmet by Fiona Mozley

Daniel lives with Daddy and his sister Cathy in the woods, in a house of their own making.

This is a small story. Much of it is describing Daniel and his family’s life, current and past, with austere and beautiful descriptions of the copse in which they now live. Eventually, a plot appears. It turns out that Daddy did not own the land he built the family house on, and an age-old question is posed: who truly owns the land? The landowner or the person living on it? Why is the answer not: the community?

This is only half of the question of ownership. The other half: bodies. Who owns them? When a character who represents tenants in a nearby village being squeezed by exorbitant rents begins to wax poetic about the good old union days when workers were fairly treated, another character (a woman), points out how those good ‘ole union boys were like to drink too much and go home and beat their wives. Similarly, throughout the book, Cathy is predated on by men, boys.

The story is told in Daniel’s first person perspective; Daniel, who lives in the woods, ignorant of the world; long-haired, midriff-bared, effeminate. Despite the tight perspective, there is something distant and ethereal about him. Simply living a rural lifestyle does not explain him; Daddy and Cathy, who know far more of the world, see him as something fragile that must be protected. It’s this lens combined with the stellar writing that elevates Elmet, makes it an engrossing version of a story that has been told many times before.

Magnetic Fields by Ron Loewinsohn

This a slim book about spaces. The spaces we inhabit, the spaces we invade. It all starts with a burglar whose taste for stealing tape decks (it’s the 70s!) is replaced by by his desire to simply exist in other people’s homes, consider their lives, drink their coffee and steal their used ashtrays.

There’s a strange feeling to being in someone else’s house, especially when they’re not home. We know that each item has its place, its emotional connections and history. Home robbery is a great violation of privacy, regardless of what is actually stolen. Magnetic Fields exists inside that feeling, both the field we create by living within it, and those fields others create that we can enter or attempt to penetrate.

From Albert the burglar, the novel moves on to other characters, other lives. The last person burglarized is a composer, who moves to a summer home with his family. He considers the inhabitants of that house, and the point of view shifts to enter their lives, and how their home is now invaded by the composer and his family, much like Albert invaded theirs.

Loewinsohn is a poet. Magnetic Fields is composed of short, tight sentences. There’s nothing lyrical about it, and “lyrical” is what I associate with poetry even though I know that is incomplete and wrong. It is only over time that the poetry influence of the book becomes clear: its structure. Passages recur, inexplicably, across chapters. Images repeat. Certain sexual acts or specific sounds. There is most likely some mathematical structure behind it; it elevates both the cohesion of the narrative and the discomfort conjured by the constant invasions of privacy.

The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

While browsing at the bookstore, I picked up the sequel to this book first. Imagine my surprise to find that there was nearly fifty years between the writing of book one (Origin) and book two (Wrath). For that reason alone, I had to read them.

West Condon. 1960s. Church Sundays and beers on the front porch. Italian immigrants and casual misogyny. Highschoolers making it in the back of cars. I was born in the mid-80s, twenty years after this book was set yet it’s remarkable how familiar the working class family community of West Condon feels. Shit I’ve completely forgotten about. The bad: men calling women “broads” or anti-Italian slurs. The good: a greater awareness and understanding of changing seasons, the smells, tastes, fresh spring sun on your skin. It was strange, unsettling.

The first 80ish pages of The Origin of the Brunists is a harrowing account of a mining disaster. Starting with miners filing into work for the night shift, taking the elevator down to the mine, and unbeknownst to them, their doom. I was again struck by familiarity. I worked the night shift for years, in a warehouse loading trucks. OK, maybe I’m dramatizing by comparing that to descending into the bowels of the earth, obliterating my lungs, and putting my life on the line daily, but still. I did almost drop a carburetor on my foot once.

Anyway, the shifting-point of views that demonstrate daily life in the mine and then the terrible disaster that rips it apart and kills ninety seven men is the best part of the novel. It can’t be overstated how miserable the role of a miner is whether it be 1966 or 2018. The novel flounders for a bit, following the disaster, is at its worst for 50-100 pages before it picks up the main thrust of the plot: Giovanni Bruno, the sole survivor of those trapped in the mine, is rescued and an emergent cult forms around the few words he can manage to dislodge from his oxygen-starved brain.

Origin feels like a proto-Stephen King novel. You know those books that flit between a dozen or more townspeople, immerse us deeply in their point of view, then move on to the next person, often displaying a contradictory angle to the person before? Needful Things, Under the Dome, etc. It’s a similar set-up here, except instead of greed and devilry, the town is afflicted by economic depression and religious mania. A specter hovers behind the Brunists. While the mine disaster is behind their rise in the most obvious sense (Bruno himself), it’s the economic and social reality behind it that truly drives it. Mining is a very dangerous job, but in some locations it’s just about the only job. Most of the early adopters of Bruno’s cult are widowed by the disaster or facing no prospects following the mine’s closure. It’s a search for answers/solace/community and especially meaning and closure that creates the Brunists, a cult slash religion that is absolutely sure the world will end soon. It didn’t end this weekend? OK, it’s for sure going to end next weekend. 

I liked this book a great deal. It didn’t completely blow me away, but the town felt so grounded that even had I not already become intrigued by the fifty year gap between them, I’d be reading the sequel. There’s a solidity to the prose that’s difficult to describe. West Condon happened. I need to know the next chapter. 

Minit — A review in 60 words

Minit is fantastic. It conjures this elusive feeling of joyful exploration that so many games seek, typically with far larger budgets, but very few achieve.

You, a little duck-like(?) creature, find a cursed sword that will kill you and send you back home every sixty seconds. Only the knowledge you gained or the items you’ve found will allow you to 

[dies]  

OK. Minit.

Turns out that by combining a retro game (NES Legend of Zelda), adding a 60 second limitation, and utilizing a minimalist yet charming aesthetic creates something surprising and wonderful. The time limit is not a thoughtless restraint — it’s used to set up puzzles that leave you scratching your head how you’ll finish in time. It’s also used to

[dies]

Where was I?

Minit’s world is peopled with cute talking animals, throwing down clever one-liners. Or playing off the time limit — one of the first buddies you encounter is an old turtle slowly recounting how to find treasure, yet initially you’ll die before he completes his tale.

The sparse black&white style can also evoke a more sinister mood like

[dies]

The game knows when to quit. Rather than bloat the length, the first run will take maybe a couple hours. Afterwards, you unlock a far more difficult 40 second mode that really pushes your sword-man efficiency. Without much planning, I reached the point where I could beat the game in about 15 minutes especially with the final unlockable mode which

[dies]

Minit is fantastic. More importantly: it is surprising.

The original Legend of Zelda is the perfect entry point. We played it as kids and there’s something child-like in the joy Minit evokes. Something from a world where you didn’t already know what was going to happen next, in gaming, or film, or novels. Something wide-eyed and fresh, full of adventure.